


Acts of Contrition

by otter



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-14
Updated: 2011-08-14
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:47:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/otter/pseuds/otter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the engines start purring, when the Ancient warship Helios stirs and shudders like a cat stretching out after a ten-thousand-year nap, when the systems all start coming online at once and Rodney's crack team of highly trained scientists are in the engine room squealing like a high school pep squad, Rodney is down the hall in a utility closet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acts of Contrition

**Author's Note:**

> Comment fic for kuwdora, who requested "Sam/Rodney. They magically make the StarDrive of Atlantis work again and take her out for a cruise around the neighborhood!" This sounded like a request for something a bit light-hearted, and the only scenario I could imagine in which they'd burn power to use the star drive mostly involved doomsday situations. So I wrote maybe the next best thing. Hope it'll do.
> 
> This is a riff on a concept from "Aurora," but I think I can safely say that this is spoiler-free.

When the engines finally roar to life, Rodney McKay is not in the engine room, one fist victoriously upraised, clutching a wrench, scorch-marks on his fingers and coolant smeared across his cheek like a red badge of courage. He does not make any speeches, does not loudly proclaim his own genius, does not even offer his team a pithy, "Good work, people. Let's bring her home."

When the engines start purring, when the Ancient warship _Helios_ stirs and shudders like a cat stretching out after a ten-thousand-year nap, when the systems all start coming online at once and Rodney's crack team of highly trained scientists are in the engine room squealing like a high school pep squad, Rodney is down the hall in a utility closet.

He's stretched out on Zelenka's sleeping bag, using his own jacket as a pillow, tucked in between a box of MREs and a caseful of some of the most expensive electronic diagnostic equipment known to man. His mouth is open, and with every rattle of breath through his throat he makes a sound disturbingly like Darth Vader. (This is probably why, in his dream, Atlantis is being attacked by armies of Stormtroopers, and Sheppard is dressed like Han Solo, and Ronon talks like Chewbacca, and maybe it's even why Teyla is wearing that gold bikini. But when he wakes up, he won't know that he was almost-snoring, and he won't remember the dream, anyway.)

When the _Helios_ lights up like a Christmas tree and Sam Carter is enthusiastically throwing herself into the arms of every person within reach, when she kisses Miko Kusanagi right on the mouth in a fit of orgasmic scientific joy doubling as one of Rodney's more favorite lesbian porn fantasies, Rodney snorts in his sleep, twitches his fingers, and does not wake.

Nobody thinks to get him, or even realizes that he's missing, until three hours later, when Zelenka walks into the utility closet, sees Rodney lying on the floor and remembers dragging him there personally.

("So you may approach the problem with a fresh mind, yes?" Radek had said. "And so you will not be murdered in cold blood by a lynch mob. These people, their IQs are too high to be wasted on jail." Rodney had said, "Alright, but you'd better not turn anything on without me. And go over those output equations again, because seriously, they're wrong, and so are you. And wake me up in an hour. And if it, you know, comes up, you should probably tell Colonel Carter about what a heroic and self-sacrificing man I am." So Radek had said, "Yes, yes. I will assure her you are very heterosexual and virile. Go to sleep or I will knock you unconscious," and Rodney had made a little happy noise and a little happy face and then rolled over and been abruptly asleep.)

So Radek freezes just inside the door, the deer in the headlights, the mouse under the cat's hovering paw, and feels the oncoming rush of his own demise as white noise in his ears and a lack of air in his lungs. Rodney is his colleague, his companion, his friend, and will undoubtedly throw all of those pleasant associations to the wind the moment that he realizes that he is the only person who was not awake to see the _Helios_ come to life. Radek predicts that the journey home -- a mere six days, with Hermiod's recently completed modifications to the _Helios_ ' hyperdrive -- will involve Rodney McKay making everyone's lives a living hell.

Well, everyone except for Radek. Radek, he will undoubtedly throttle with his bare hands, right here in this very utility closet. Zelenka hopes for a nice memorial service (and maybe has a little fantasy of Elizabeth crying over him and confessing tearfully that her feelings for Radek ran deeper than she ever admitted), and then he kneels down next to Rodney's sprawled body and puts his hand very gently on Rodney's shoulder.

"McKay," he says softly, maybe too softly because he doesn't genuinely want Rodney to wake up at all, at least until they get back to Atlantis where there are vast distances which may be used for running away. "Rodney," he says, a little louder, a little braver.

Rodney blinks, then squints, wakes almost as if he wasn't sleeping at all, and he looks at his watch and says, " _Six hours?_ Zelenka, you little--"

Then he trails off, mouth open and eyes wide. Though the _Helios_ has extremely advanced systems designed to prevent the hull from vibrating and the floors from shaking under the massive power of the engines, it is obvious that the ship is alive, is moving, is flying from the nest without Rodney's supervision.

The look on Rodney's face when he realizes it makes Radek's chest hurt with guilty, impotent sympathy. His hand is still on Rodney's shoulder; he moves it up a little, to the crest of muscle between shoulder and neck, and squeezes gently, a soft apology. "I'm sorry," he says out loud. "I'm so sorry, Rodney. I got caught up in the moment... I didn't think."

He says it that way almost by design, because it's such an open door. "I didn't think" leads so effortlessly to a multitude of insults, a legion of small derisions, an easy outlet for all that wounded humiliation that's flush-bright across Rodney's cheeks.

"Oh God," Rodney says. It's all he says, but it's eloquent, too; his voice just skates the edge of cracking, and his fingers tighten convulsively around a fistful of sleeping bag. He has the eyes of a man who has just realized that his going-to-work-naked dream is not a dream at all.

"It's my fault," Radek says, a little desperately, because yelling and strangling would be preferable to this heavy silence and the crushing weight of this guilt that he can't do anything about.

Rodney's jaw works for a moment, open and shut like he's trying to find words to express his horror, but finally he just shakes it off, shakes off Radek's hand, too, scrambles to his feet and kicks the sleeping bag away, almost viciously.

"What's our systems status?" he finally says, already double-timing it out the door and toward the engine room. "How are the engines? How fast did you cycle up?" He has more questions, too, and he fumbles them out too fast, all the words running into each other. They aren't really important anyway, because what he's really asking is "Why didn't you wake me?" and "How could you do this to me?"

Radek only answers the questions that Rodney actually voices, though, because addressing the unspoken ones seems like unnecessary cruelty, and he isn't sure that Rodney's heart can stand to be broken again today.

When they walk into the engine room, only a few people even look up from their displays. (The _Helios_ has been sending out data like erotic aftershocks, the technological version of offering a post-orgasmic cigarette, and Radek is not at all surprised to see his colleagues still in the throes of this scientific orgy.) Rodney doesn't look at them, either, just sits down at Radek's terminal and starts running diagnostics, but when he speaks again to quiz Radek about power consumption statistics, people begin to realize that their usual voice of torment has been silent for hours.

A couple of them just squint in Rodney's direction, like they're trying to figure out what's not computing, and then Colonel Carter looks up from her display, smirks, and says, "Have a nice nap, Doctor McKay?"

Miko Kusanagi slaps both hands to her mouth, as if to hold in the anguished wail of her doomed love, and then rushes from the room.

"Yes, thank you," Rodney says, without looking at Carter at all. "Very refreshing. And surprisingly, I'm still alive, even though you children have been playing with power tools unsupervised again." He directs a glare across the room at Rodecker and Owen, who abruptly stop chuckling to themselves. "I'm surprised you two haven't electrocuted yourselves in my absence, considering you can hardly manage to turn on your own computers."

"Actually," Carter says, even though Radek is mentally saying _shut up, shut up, shut up_ at her, "Rodecker saved us a lot of time. He's the one who found the problem in your equations that was keeping the hyperdrive from cycling properly. All things considered, we probably got the work done a lot faster without you."

"Nice," Rodney says. "Let's all just kick the chief science officer while he's down, shall we?" He hunches over his display like he's trying to protect his baby from having to see its parents fight. "I'll be sure to give Doctor Rodecker an F-plus on his report card. Radek, go find Kusanagi and make sure she isn't committing ritual suicide or something."

Radek hesitates, but he doesn't have a choice, really; to defy Rodney's orders now would be a final blow to both authority and ego. So Radek just says, "Right, of course," and slips out the door, the mouse running right over the paws of a cat too weary to care.

+++

The next two days are like hell, without the nice balmy temperature. An anonymous email circulates, formally proposing that the _Helios_ be given a more fitting moniker, like "The Inferno." (Things get especially bad when somebody lets something slip about the Carter and Kusanagi liplock incident, which was perfectly innocent but undeniably hot, and which Rodney becomes completely despondent over missing, almost moreso than the whole thing with reawakening the ten-thousand-year-old spaceship.) Kusanagi starts breaking into tears with little to no provocation, Rodecker spends a lot of time looking over his shoulder, presumably waiting for McKay's revenge, and Rodney himself is too busy searching frantically for programming flaws that aren't there to bother much with any of them. When he isn't combing through code or browbeating his personnel, he's sitting on the command deck, claiming the captain's chair and staring moodily at the forward viewscreen (which is white, blank, to conserve power) as if he thinks he's some version of James T. Kirk who's been spurned by the hot alien women of the galaxy and betrayed by a mutinous crew.

It's ridiculous, of course. Everyone knows that Sheppard is supposed to be Kirk, and Rodney is more of a very fatalistic Scotty with a Canadian accent, hollering from the engine room that he can't get any more power, cap'n, so the ship's going to explode and everyone's doomed to a horrible fiery death, eh?

Radek mostly keeps his head down, both figuratively and literally, and tries to stay out of Rodney's way. He can take Rodney's temper, but his own guilt is heavier, harder to carry; he bears it on his bent neck and sloping shoulders, and he walks around like an insignificant Atlas, with his eyes on the deck.

After awhile the readings from the _Helios_ get to be kind of repetitive, even boring, so Radek starts catching up on other things, all the reports and project summaries he needs to review. This isn't part of his job, technically, but many of the others in the science unit have taken to sending him their reports for proof-reading before they send them along to McKay; Zelenka corrects their mistakes very nicely, so they can fix them before McKay sees the problems and decides to roast the offending personnel publically. Today Zelenka decides that some of his co-workers can sacrifice a little pride for the greater good; when he finds the mistakes, he forwards them along to Rodney, in the hopes that his staff's stupidity will cheer Rodney up a little.

In the evening, when everyone but the nighttime military patrol detail has retired to quarters for the night, Radek gets a single email back that says, "Don't you usually correct these things before anyone sends them to me? I would ask what's up with you, but I don't really care. Please have these idiots correct their idiotic work before they get us all killed. McKay."

As missives from their not-terribly-brave leader go, it's kind of a let-down. Radek frowns, puts his tablet computer down on his bunk, and leaves his room. He walks down the corridor to the ladder, travels down one deck, over two sections, back up again and forward another three sections. The scientists have mostly settled into compartments near the engine room, but the bulk of the military personnel (if four out of six Marines and the only airman can count as a "bulk") chose quarters closer to the command deck, which are presumably in some way tactically advantageous.

Radek finds Carter's berth (it's the one with the strip of dull silver duct tape on the door that says "CARTER" in permanent marker) and knocks sharply, three times, just the way the Marines always seem to do this sort of thing: assertively, with just the slightest edge of aggression.

Carter calls, "Enter!" through the door, and when he steps inside she's lounging on her cot with her back against the wall, frowning and jabbing away at a tablet computer with one neatly manicured finger. She looks unsettlingly like Rodney for a moment, with that focused squint and her short hair ruffled as if from the passage of her fingers. "Just a sec," she says, when Radek starts to speak, and she pokes at the tablet a few times, then makes a little disgusted noise and puts it aside.

She finally looks up, says, "What's up, Radek?" and swings her feet off the bunk like she's either planning to get up or making room for him to sit. (The berths are small, though slightly better than some aircraft carriers Radek has known, and there's not really room for chairs.)

He isn't sure if that's an invitation or not, so he just stands by the door, puts his hands in his pockets to keep from twisting his fingers anxiously. (That's a habit he's picked up from Rodney; their association is also rapidly degrading his social skills and his powers of civil debate.) He says, "Colonel Carter. I believe you have read most of the mission reports from our expedition, correct?"

Carter frowns, wipes her palms against her pantlegs. (The tablets warm up when they've been running awhile, and it makes the palms sweat; Radek had that problem for days on Atlantis before he realized that it was just the computer, and not all the paralyzing terror, that was causing the reaction.) She says, "Sure, of course I have," and seems justifiably confused about exactly what it is that Radek wants.

"Then you know about the time that Rodney saved us all by walking into the heart of a very dangerous energy being," Radek says. "And also when he saved his team by fixing broken puddlejumper drive pods. And the city would surely have been lost to a massive storm if Rodney had not--"

"Wow," Carter says. "I can't believe he put you up to this. And I really can't believe you're actually doing it."

Radek lets out a breath and says, "Yes, you're right. I can't believe I am either." He leans back against the wall, and he can practically hear the ship breathing, but he can't quite feel it. Not like Rodney does, certainly not like Sheppard would.

It reminds him of standing in Lab Six, the day after the gene therapy, staring down at the lifesigns detector in his hand, willing it to light up, to do something, willing the city to love Radek like Radek loved it. The city had spurned him like an unwelcome suitor, but Rodney had just looked over Radek's shoulder and frowned and said, "Hm. Gene therapy needs a little fine-tuning, I guess. Maybe Carson didn't sacrifice enough chickens or something," and then he'd called Beckett on the radio and demanded to know things like why the gene therapy wasn't delivering as promised, and if Carson needed more resources to help with the project, and if Rodney should try to find an additional voodoo priest on his next off-world expedition. Later Radek had seen notes about it on Rodney's laptop, useless flailing because Rodney wasn't really any good at all with biological sciences, but he'd been trying, at any rate.

Radek straightens up, shakes the weight off his shoulders, and says, "Actually, if you're not too busy, I would very much appreciate if you would help me to sabotage the _Helios_ ' engines."

Later, when they're huddled together over a control station in the engine room, inserting a few well-placed and subtle mistakes into the otherwise smooth and elegant coding, Carter says, "You know, I worked on the Stargate project for years and years, and when they finally opened the Gate for the first time, nobody even _told_ me until months after the first mission was over."

Radek nods and says, "While you were on alien planets, I was still wasting time on rockets for the Russian space program. Nobody told me about the Stargates at all."

Carter sighs, leans into Radek with her shoulder in commiseration and solidarity, and says, "Oh, wait, put a hash there first, before the backslash. That'll drive him _crazy_."

"Yes, good," Radek says. "And I thought perhaps this." He opens another subroutine, types in a few lines, pauses to examine them critically, and then says, "I don't know. It's lacking something."

Carter squints at it too, and then says, "Oh! I know!" and types in a few lines of her own.

"Yes, this is excellent," Radek agrees. "Providing it doesn't kill us all." It looks nice, though, hidden and buried away in unsuspecting subroutines, these neatly typed lines like whispered Hail Marys and Our Fathers, each character a small act of contrition.

Carter shrugs and says, "What's a little explosive decompression between friends, huh?" She nudges his shoulder again and grins, and Radek can kind of see why Rodney likes her so much, when the two of them aren't busy eviscerating each other's egos. (Secretly, Radek thinks that both of them benefit from it, the way they devour and destroy one another's pride. He also thinks they get off on it, though he tries not to contemplate that idea too closely. But sometimes he fears that egos, like bones, only grow back stronger where they've been broken.)

"Right, of course," Radek says, and he erases the evidence of their tampering, modifies the logs, backs out of the system slowly, as if he's trying not to jostle the bomb they've left behind.

+++

He regrets his magnanimous nature somewhat, however, when Rodney knocks on his hatch at 0428, ship's time, and says through the door, "Zelenka! Get out of bed and come help me before the ship blows up."

But Radek does get out of bed, pulls on his jacket and shuffles bleary-eyed into the engine room, where there's a steaming cup of coffee waiting for him, as well as Rodney already sitting at one of the consoles, typing furiously.

Rodney says things like, "You see, this is what happens when you power up systems you hardly understand and don't bother to wake me first," and, "My God, _hash_ backslash? Who wrote this, a mentally damaged monkey?" and "Hey! That's my coffee!"

Radek mostly stands over Rodney's shoulder and sips at Rodney's coffee and makes approving noises as Rodney writes new subroutines. He doesn't think that Rodney needs help so much as he needs a witness to his brilliance.

When Colonel Carter strolls in at 0500, Rodney is just putting the finishing touches on his own subroutine, which Radek has to admit is a very beautiful, compact little piece of coding. It doesn't address the actual problem, of course, since Rodney has no way of knowing about the sabotage (yet, and Radek will have to go in and carefully delete his malicious software before Rodney takes the time to find it), but it's an excellent solution to the problem, the perfect medicine to treat the symptom, if not the larger disease.

The pitch of the engine changes a little (or it could just be Radek's imagination) when the built-up energy charge starts dissipating through the drive manifolds, and Rodney sits back with a satisfied look on his face.

"Still looking for non-existent problems, McKay?" Carter says, sitting down at her own terminal, carrying her own cup of coffee.

"No, I'm not," Rodney says. "I'm fixing the very real ones." He waves a hand at the central indicator cylinder and says, "Luckily I was here to avert the catastrophic overload that would've resulted from the excess charge building up in the manifolds."

(The central indicator cylinder takes this opportunity to release a cloud of bubbles, as if to voice its own indignation at Radek and Carter's violation. It is not really a critical part of the engine, more like a lava lamp and a mood ring all in one, and its function seems to be mostly diagnostic and slightly decorative; the clear, bubbling cylinder holds a liquid that changes color to let anyone in the engine room know exactly how the _Helios_ is feeling right then. The little tendrils of angry orange that have been leaking in for the past few hours have faded into a soft, pleased blue, shot through with a more navy shade, and Radek thinks that might mean that the _Helios_ is coming on to Rodney, a little bit. There are similar structures in other sections of the _Helios_ , and all over Atlantis, and Radek is starting to have thoughts about how those structures always light up and pulse in vivid, vibrant color anytime Sheppard is anywhere near them. He's developing a theory that these reactions are Atlantis' equivalent of, "Hey, how _you_ doin'?")

"Huh," Carter says, and her smooth facade carefully hides the glee that she displayed when helping Radek to cause this problem in the first place. She walks over and stands next to Radek, peering over Rodney's shoulder at the lines of code that Rodney has written to counteract their fabrication. "That's nice work, McKay," she finally says, with a tone of serious grudging respect. "Guess we're lucky you were here."

Rodney snorts, takes his coffee back from Radek (the cup's nearly empty, but he drinks the dregs from the bottom anyway). "Right," he says. "Because this just happened to pop up two days after the engine came online." He pushes his empty cup back into Radek's hands, then twists his head to regard the cup that Carter's holding, and he takes that one, too.

"Hey!" Carter says, at the same time that Rodney says, "Please! I'm a genius! Like I wasn't going to know? And you'd better undo whatever it is you did before it blows us up for real."

He pauses to slurp at Carter's coffee, giving the co-conspirators a moment to exchange meaningful looks, calculating their odds for plausible deniability.

"Nice try, anyway," Rodney says, and when he stands and hands Carter's cup back to her, it's completely empty.

"We just thought you might enjoy the challenge," Radek says, a little downcast because he really can't imagine how Rodney figured it out, but then, Rodney's mind has always been a mystery. The kind of mystery he doesn't want to plumb too deeply, either, like the "feminine products" aisle at the supermarket.

"Yeah," Carter agrees. "We were all sleep-deprived and honestly, we just didn't realize that you weren't there." Then she says, "Hey, nobody told Radek about the Stargates until he wasted years of his life becoming the foremost expert on rocket propulsion for the Russian space program."

"Yes!" Radek says. "And Colonel Carter was Earth's foremost expert on Stargates, but did they call her when they figured out how to open it? No."

"Yes, well," Rodney says, and he doesn't say embarrassing things like "thank you" or "you're forgiven," but it's there on his face. "Nothing says 'I'm sorry' like chocolate bars," he says instead, poking Radek in the chest with his finger. Then he turns to Carter and says, "And, contrary to what you might think, I would not feel obligated to make any gentlemanly refusals if you were to offer pity sex."

Radek coughs to keep from laughing, drops into Rodney's chair and starts digging in to undo the damage. He's already mentally composing his report ("the _Helios_ and all hands would likely have been lost to the resulting overload and explosion, if Doctor McKay had not found the errors in the drive initialization sequence and corrected them in time") when Carter takes a step back and says, "Oh, that's okay. I wouldn't insult your sense of ethics and deep moral fiber by even suggesting any such thing."

"Um," Rodney says.

"But I will buy you another coffee," Carter says, her voice kinder now, and when Radek looks back at them she's steering Rodney out of the room.

"Oh," Rodney says. "Um. You will?"

There's a lifesigns detector built into the _Helios_ ' standard console systems, and it requires no gene to activate, now that the ship's running. Radek starts the program up when the sound of Rodney and Carter's footsteps takes them beyond the science team's berthing compartment.

The two little white dots that are Colonel Carter and Doctor McKay travel down one deck, over two sections, back up again and forward another three sections.

Radek watches the display until both lifesigns stop moving, and he thinks, _Huh._ Then he turns back to his work, sinks his fingers down into the _Helios_ ' subroutines, the Ancient coding graceful and elegant like a woman's curves, and he smooths out the wrinkles that he added himself, gently wiping the code clean like he's apologizing to the _Helios_ , too. It responds with a little huff of bubbles and a flash of pale lavender, but Radek is undeterred. He spends the next few hours pointedly not watching the two little white lifesigns (which haven't moved either, in all this time), and instead finds places to hone the coding a little further: a boost in efficiency here, a rerouting of essential power there.

By the time the other members of the science team start straggling in to begin another day's work, accompanied by their Marine guard (armed with P90s, 9mm handguns, playing cards and poker chips), the lifesigns detector is showing two dots still in quarters in the forward section, Doctor Zelenka is slumped over his console and snoring slightly, and the _Helios_ is signalling _apology accepted, honey_ in vivid come-hither green.

the end


End file.
